An old photography/videography trick is using a shower curtain as a light diffuser. Works really well. A lot more light will pass through than a t-shirt and it’ll be more uniformily diffused.

Still can’t wear a mask properly

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These are good questions to ask one’s #resist friends. They’re questions to keep asking. I don’t know how good they do though. In my experience, continuing to remind my friends that Biden had credible accusations of SA never moved the needle for them.

Really don’t wanna be that guy, but it’s pronounced “buhskettee-o’s”

…or even just a study group. It doesn’t need to be explicitly Marxist-Leninist…

This cannot be emphasized enough. There are people who are already organizing around you. Your library has volunteer opportunities, there are soup kitchens, running groups, anything that gets you in contact with community. You don’t have to nor should you do organizing alone.

Oh ok, that makes sense.

MAYBE A PICTURE OF VADER FORCE CHOKING ANYONE OTHER THAN A SPACE NAZI WOULD BE SLIGHTLY BETTER FOR THIS MEME.

Everything besides the sickness y’all had/have sounds pretty dope though. I keep meaning to get my kids some cardboard cutters. What a cool event!

The Great Sand Dunes are something I’m definitely bringing the kids to when they’re older. They’re good little hikers, but they get distracted by every bug and leaf on the trail. I think they’d try to climb to the top of the dunes though.

It’s a holiday week in America, so all the drama of my family is coming around again. I don’t wanna go all r/AITA about it because who the fuck cares. Anyway, my partner and I don’t really being around my brother’s in-laws. His partner has a two sisters, each with multiple kids. All the in-laws’ kids and my nibling (my brother’s kid) hang out together all the time. Same school for a few of them and my brother’s MIL watches them all at the same time a couple days a week. Honestly, they’re fine people, okay even. My partner and I just don’t jive with them. We have no relationship with these people other than them being related to my brother’s spouse.

But that’s the thing, they are my brother’s family. So it kinda bums me out that he habitually invites all of his in-laws to my parents’ for holidays. Often neither he nor my parents will telegraph that the in-laws are coming. One time all my brother’s in-laws came to one of my kid’s birthdays. Granted my kid’s birthday is near a holiday, but my parents agreed to host and planned for my kid to have their birthday celebration. We wanted it to just be “our” family.

To complicate things more, over time my brother’s kid has become a bit of a jerk. They’re bossy and kind of mean. My kids have wanted to see their cousin less and less over the past year. So my partner and I have to prepare our kids to be around their cousin. We were just informed, today, that my brother’s in-laws are going to be at my parent’s house for the 4th of July. To avoid a lot of consternation, my partner and I have made other plans. Which of course has caused a whole slue of drama in the family. Really fun.

Hooo boy, if Israel is the safest place in the world for Jews I couldn’t imagine how dangerous a Connecticut suburb might be.

I literally don’t get movies anymore. I don’t understand reviews or box office numbers or audience scores. Whatever. Budgets for these movies are the GDP of small nations. And I’ve been so outside of the comic book scene for so long I have no idea what hallowed source material this movie is based on, not that it really matters.

What I do know is that whatever women are connected to this project are gonna be castigated by the sweatiest guys, whatever clunky writing there is is going to definitely be written by ChatGPT, and little girls wanting to look up to a woman hero are going to be gifted another subpar product. Halloween will still be an Elsa dress-up day like it has been for the last 10+ years.

Remember, fellow Americans, everything in Europe is about a thousand miles more north than you think. 37°C in London is like 100°F in northern Maine.

This is rape-culture taken to its logical conclusion. If a nice young boy can’t be accountable for his actions because a nice young girl wore a skirt then it only follows that an oppressor state can genocide a people because they lived on land they wanted.

That’s actually just a Jerusalem cross. A relatively innocuous Christian symbol used by chuds because Christian crusaders used it.

That Lindsay Graham is fucking cursed lol. I love it.

Assuming the tennis ball retains the same mass, I will make the tennis ball big enough such that the outer shell of tennis ball is a few atoms thick. So maybe the size of earth? Drop it from one millimeter. The only down sides of this are that the tennis ball is displace a huge amount of air in our atmosphere, devastating air currants and weather. Since that the interior of the tennis ball will be a near vacuum, it will also be incredibly buoyant in the atmosphere. I don’t think the gravitational attraction of the earth on the near side of the tennis ball will be enough to overcome the buoyancy, so I will have to jump very quickly to make contact with it. As the tennis ball’s shell makes contact on my head it will likely rupture. All the displaced air will now fill the colossal void left by the tennis ball. I will be sucked up into the vortex and likely murderlated by the sheer force on my body. The ensuing maelstrom will level buildings and destroy everything on the North American continent except the mountains. The tsunami ripples of air will continue to rebound around the whole planet for months if not years.

I will leave all my prize money to whomever survives. Because a tennis ball is .06 kg and the prize money is $10,000 per kilogram per meters dropped. So I think the result is around $6.

(In this post: “Someday I’ll find a way to write more concisely” and other such lies I tell people on the internet.)

Really eventful week for me. I went on a big trip with my brothers to the Rockies. First time really being away from my kids since they were born, barring isolating because of illness or sleeping at a friend’s house for a night.

It was a rewarding and revealing trip. My brothers and I bounded as adults like we have never before. We unpacked emotions and pushed our aging bodies more than we should have. We uplifted each other and learned about one another. We disagreed, but as adults disagree, putting the pettiness of our childhood squabbles to bed. Well, for the most part. We might never leave our assigned sibling roles. My older brother is the brash and outgoing first child. Successful in his life through force of will, if not by smarts then by his disarming charm and unscrupulous nature. He is the most interesting person in the room and will collect your friendship like a trophy, both to display and to cherish. My younger brother is the quiet and contemplative type. He’s simultaneously the fulfillment and foil of our father’s wishes. As intelligent as he is handsome, as athletic as he is aimless. He inhabits a constant state of not knowing who he is, what he wants, or what he believes. I shouldn’t escape scrutiny either. I exemplify the jaded middle child. Distant, irreverent, sometimes disappointing, sometimes humbling, always the heart. The one who has visited Hell.

I love my brothers, but I’m going to enjoy being away from them for a while again. Any mention of anything remotely political (which to me everything, but I mean the more colloquial use of the term) resulted in my older brother going on liberal diatribes. He’s always had a holier-than-thou air. While he’s well-read, he reads like water passes through a sieve. He independently came up with the idea of ‘disaster gentrification’ as a response to a recent disaster that happened to their city. Doesn’t matter that he has probably read about it before. He genuinely doesn’t see a downside to gentrification. “The city should cut those people who lost their home a check and move them somewhere else. Then the land could be leveled and put up for sale by the city.” He’s constantly disappointed with his city, not out of some compassion for the unhoused or the working poor, but rather because there isn’t enough ‘culture’ to attract investment. “The city is dead. No one knows how to solve it.”

My little brother has little to say. He told us he’s intimidated by his older brothers knowledge, always has been. My older brother and I have spared verbally since before words held any meaning. I’m always in rare form for my older brother, bringing my best counters and considerations. As I’ve gotten older I don’t fight him anymore. I’ve learned from comrades that debate doesn’t shift people as much as I used to think. On our trip I mentioned how reading theory was difficult for me, so I seek theory out in fictional works. My little brother asked what I meant by ‘reading theory’. I don’t hear him sound as interested very often. I explained (well, my older brother explained, and then re-explained) what I meant, and how there are discrete political and economic theories outside of what he knows. He knows a lot. He’s the smart one. Though he is wholly unfamiliar with thought outside of liberalism. I’m hopeful he looks into the reading list I sent him.

I cannot help thinking this liberal understanding of the material reality of people negatively affects my niblings, my older brother’s kids. He has two kids just like me, and similar ages too. But our kids are vastly different in temperament. My kids are not perfect, but I’m glad they aren’t his. My partner and I pour so much energy into helping our children exercise empathy and compassion, for themselves and others, and build up their inner strengths. I get to toot my own horn about them. Everyone is amazed by my kids; they fucking rock. My brother’s oldest is, by his own admission, a brat. That’s putting it gently. They’re bossy and vindictive and cannot deal with others receiving more adulation. These are their worst qualities and absolutely do not define them as a person. But they stand tall in my brother’s mind. During our trip my brother expressed how nice it was to be away from his oldest. “They’re an asshole. Too much of me and my wife in them. And our dad. And grandma. They’re honestly like living with grandma. Your kids are the sweetest kids on the planet. You really lucked out.”

My little brother wants kids. He is recently jobless and his partner works for a major company in a leadership position. He says they want to be financially stable before having children. However, further campfire discussions brought out more truths. They have an overwhelming fear of bringing about a child in this world. I talked to him about antinatalism using dialectics, addressing the forces that have influenced the antinatalist position as well as its strengths and weaknesses. More importantly how principled antinatalism isn’t a reaction to fear of the world but how it is, in part, a ethical framework for analysis. I don’t think it all made sense to him. I was multiple beers under and dehydrated, so I probably wasn’t a great explainer either. But both of my brothers couldn’t quite get over what to them seemed like a contradiction. That I have these wonderful children but do not begrudge anyone who is a principled antinatalist.

Artists often get compliments that are meant to express amazement or awe at their work. “You’re so talented,” sounds nice. But the artist understands it different. Talent is not doled out by god fully formed. It is stock iron that must be forged into something useful that can then be employed to create a painting or a sculpture. My children are not ontologically sweet anymore than my older brother’s kid is a natural brat. My kids are people who are still small and malleable, as fickle as untempered clay. I have told my brother and my family this more times than I can count, “We try really hard to help them do good.” Not do ‘well’ like in a job, but do ‘good’ as in what Superman does.

Ah fuck, I did it again. I wrote on and on about some bullshit that hardly anyone’s gonna read. I’ll put a pithy little thing at the beginning about my long-windedness.

Also we hiked a huge sand dune at night and it was rad as hell.

Have you tried a mask with a different fit? Sometimes a tighter seal is less hot. You’re not expelling as much humid air back onto your face. NIOSH rated cup-shaped N95s work best for me in high humidity, like a 3M 8200.

But honestly just wear what you can.